Month: September 2005

(Via A Conservative Blog for Peace.)

Post to the host for May 2001:

Mr. Keillor,I’ve been wondering if you picture the Lake Wobegon Lutherans as ELCA Lutherans. If so what do you think of the new communion between the Lutheran and Episcopal churches, and thus what would the good reserved Scandinavian folks there in Minnesota think of their more liberal Anglican brethren?

Aidan

Dear Aidan, The ELCA Lutherans of Lake Wobegon were dead set against the new communion, although some of them (I name no names) have, while visiting their fallen-away children in distant cities, attended Episcopal churches (with the children) and partaken of communion. But they don’t want there to be an official link that might, over the years, grow tighter and, before you know it, you’ll find Pastor Ingqvist processing in a dress and a rhinestone-encrusted cape preceded by two guys twirling incense pots on chains like they were yo-yos and go through a lot of bowing and turning and genuflecting. And suddenly the Bible-based sermon of 25 minutes turns into a 6-minute homily about the beauty of flowers. And the Sunday School takes up the infrastructure needs of the inner cities. And soon you realize that your young people are a little shaky on their Bible stories and parables and can’t find Jeremiah or Deuteronomy or even Ephesians without looking up the page number in the index. No, the Lutherans of Lake Wobegon don’t care to go in that direction. Anglicanism is for when you take a vacation to England. It’s like nightclubbing that way. It’s for special occasions. You don’t want to make a practice of it.

This one’s from Anglican theologian Oliver O’donovan, from an interview he did with the Calvin Collge Chimes a few years ago:

I think [Stanley Hauerwas’] criticisms of the Christendom idea are partly wrong, first because he dismisses the church as always being a minority. I don’t know on what theological authority one could make that assertion. The church has very often been a minority. But whether the church is a majority or a minority at any time or place, the church is not given yet to be wholly visible to itself. There is a real temptation in wanting to be a visible minority, a gathered church in which you can say, “We are few, but we know exactly who we are, and we know who is on our side. The line is drawn clearly and unambiguously between us and the world.” That kind of visibility and definition is not granted to the church in our age. We know where the church is because we know where the sacraments are and where the word is preached. We see people gathering to the sacraments, we see the church taking form. I’m with Augustine and again a gathered church Protestantism. The edges are always indistinct. Is this person moving into the church, giving light to those who dwell within the house, or is he just standing on the edge and about to turn his back? We don’t know. … Even if it’s true that the church is going to be a minority, the church is going to be embattled and contested to a certain extent, but it can be so as a majority sometimes. Evil has its ways of challenging the church when it’s in an apparently confident position just as much. Even if the church is a minority, it can’t be a self-conscious minority which says to itself, “We’re perfectly safe because we’re a minority.” That I have to say I find troubling in the kind of catacomb consciousness I find in Stan and John Howard Yoder. I don’t think it was at all typical of the Christians that actually inhabited the catacombs. They didn’t huddle down there and say, “How nice. We at least know who we are while we’re down here.”

An oldie but a goodie from the Bruderhof site:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Brandon has a good post on the now-common argument that the disaster in New Orleans has somehow discredited libertarianism. I’ve actually read people who say that this shows the bankruptcy of the concept of “limited government.” Should we assume such people are for unlimited government?

The problem with the handling of this situation, in my view, has a lot more to do with venality and incompetence than with excessive devotion to the principles of Locke and Jefferson.

Andrew Bacevich* reviews Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, which Bacevich says is a paean to American soliders who, in Kaplan’s view, are the elite vanguard of a new American empire which is the only hope for pulling the rest of the world out of chaos:

Reactionary populists idealize the past because they loathe the present. Kaplan proves no exception. Fawning over soldiers as a virtuous remnant of a lost, better age, he misses no opportunity to express his contempt for his contemporaries who do not share in the austere existence of the classic man-at-arms. The targets of his wrath include, but are by no means limited to, narcissistic intellectuals, risk-averse politicians, micromanaging generals, bean-counting bureaucrats, wimpy journalists who have never visited Djibouti or Mongolia, the entire “policy nomenklatura in Washington and New York–in its cocoon of fine restaurants and theoretical discussions,” and all manner of effete civilians, especially those residing in New England, which Kaplan, who makes his home in Massachusetts, describes as awash with pacifists.

Why are such people worth defending? How is it that a warped and decadent society manages to produce such sturdy warriors? Hovering in the background of his snapshot, these questions do not interest Kaplan. He prefers to focus on the American soldier in the field, where the order of the day has less to do with defending the country per se than with managing a global empire.

On that empire Kaplan is bullish. He views the global war on terror as an opportunity to push out its boundaries–if the policy-making twits in Washington will simply give dirty-boots soldiers the latitude to do so. “To be an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century,” he writes, “was to be present at a grand and fleeting moment.”

The events of September 11, 2001, inaugurated what Kaplan calls America’s “Second Expeditionary Era”–the first had begun with the expansionist surge of 1898–in which US forces once again sally forth to take up “the white man’s burden,” a phrase that he employs without irony or apology.

Kaplan laces his narrative with ostentatious references to emperors and adventurers, proconsuls and viceroys, ranging from T.E. Lawrence to “Ligustinus, the Roman centurion.” The cumulative effect is to suggest that the United States today is simply doing what empires throughout history have done: shouldering “the righteous responsibility to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos.” To imply that other, less exalted considerations just might enter into the equation–power? profit?–becomes unseemly. For Kaplan, the essence of empire is helping those unable to help themselves, creating order out of anarchy and uplifting the downtrodden.

In this sense, as Kaplan sees it, 9/11 returned the US military to its nineteenth-century roots when advancing the boundaries of free society meant removing any obstacles impeding the westward march of the young Republic. Today’s war on terror is “really about taming the frontier,” with the frontier now literally without limits. According to Kaplan, the vast swath of Islam, stretching from Africa across the Middle East to Southeast Asia, now qualifies as “Injun Country.” The “entire planet” has now become “battle space for the American military.”

Read the rest here.
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*Yes, I realize I never finished my review of his book. Long story short: Bacevich thinks that we’ve reached a point where the entire political class as well as large swaths of the American public have come to believe in American military power as a nigh-omnipotent force for “spreading our values.” This, combined with an addiction to cheap oil, has embroiled us in the messy and dysfunctional politics of the Middle East with little appreciation of the dangers, Iraq being a case in point. The solution, in his view, is a strategic pullback, allowing other countries to pick up the slack of their own defense, a return to the policy of using force only as a last resort, and a genuine commitment to energy independence. I think he’s substantially right about all of this.

Okay, not really (made ya look though, didn’t I?), but Jonathan Rauch has a column comparing the philosophy behind Sen. Santorum’s It Takes a Family and “classic” Goldwater-Reagan conservatism. In Rauch’s view, Santorum represents a principled turn away from the individualist/limited government paradigm (allegedly) represented by Reagan.

In Santorum’s view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is “no-fault freedom,” individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: “freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice.” This, he says, is “the liberal definition of freedom,” and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.

Quite different is “the conservative view of freedom,” “the liberty our Founders understood.” This is “freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self.” True liberty is freedom in the service of virtue—not “the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be,” or “the freedom to be left alone,” but “the freedom to attend to one’s duties—duties to God, to family, and to neighbors.”

This kind of freedom depends upon and serves virtue, and virtue’s indispensable incubator and transmitter is the family. Thus “selflessness in the family is the basis for the political liberty we cherish as Americans.” If government is to defend liberty and promote the common welfare, then it must promote and defend the integrity of the traditional family. In doing so, it will foster virtue and rebuild the country’s declining social and moral capital, thus fostering liberty and strengthening family. The liberal cycle of decline—families weaken, disorder spreads, government steps in, families weaken still further—will be reversed.

As a libertarian-conservative Rauch naturally thinks this is a turn for the worse.

Goldwater and Reagan, and Madison and Jefferson, were saying that if you restrain government, you will strengthen society and foster virtue. Santorum is saying something more like the reverse: If you shore up the family, you will strengthen the social fabric and ultimately reduce dependence on government.

Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: “In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society.” Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.

Santorum seems to sense as much. In an interview with National Public Radio last month, he acknowledged his quarrel with “what I refer to as more of a libertarianish Right” and “this whole idea of personal autonomy.” In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, “Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.”

They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, “individual development accounts,” publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in “every school in America” (his italics), and more. Lots more.

What I think we have here is one more crack in the post-World War II conservative movement, which has been coming apart at the seams at least since the end of the Cold War. Part of the glue that held libertarians and “traditionalists” together in the conservative coalition was the belief that Big Government was the chief enemy of intact, flourishing families. While libertarians were opposed to Big Government in principle as a violation of individual rights, traditionalists were concerned that it suffocated the initiative and self-reliance of families (and local communities). Thus the two factions could join forces in a campaign to roll back the encroachments of the state.

However, I think a lot of traditionalists and social conservatives have come to realize that the state is not the only enemy of the family. Many have turned their attention to the market as a force that corrodes traditional values, undermines cohesive families, and disrupts communities. Thus they are less skittish about using government power to protect families from those forces, and don’t see reducing government as an end in itself.

Of course, some traditionalists always realized this. Russell Kirk was just as opposed to a society dominated by the values of the market as he was by the spirit of collectivism manifested in socialism and communism. He championed the “humane economy” of Wilhelm Roepke who favored a market hemmed in by strong social, cultural and legal institutions. Such conservatives believed that families and humane values couldn’t flourish in a society of dog-eat-dog capitalism and expressive individualism. It’s also worth noting that the Catholic Church, not exactly a bastion of liberalism, has long insisted on a “just wage” so that one working parent (preferably the father) could support a family.

The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that we are “dependent rational animals” – that is, that we all go through periods of dependence on others (infancy, sickness, disability) and that cultivating the virtues of mutual aid and solidarity is a precondition for the flourishing of any human community. This is not to say that government can or should be the one inculcating these virtues, but it can restrain some of the forces that make it difficult to practice them.

Conservatives have also joined with anti-corporate liberals in opposing the conflation of entertainment and information and marketing to children, and questioning the value of unchecked technological progress and eschewing the values of consumerism.

Needless to say, none of this shows the merit of the particular programs suggested by Santorum, or that the problems families face are always best addressed by government. The Catholic principle of “subsidiarity” suggests that many problems are best handled at the most local level feasible. Plus some of his “pro-family” statements consist of little more than scapegoating gay people. But I think it is an authentically conservative impulse to be concerned about how the social and economic environment affects the health of families beyond simply getting government off their backs.

O.C. premier tonight! Yeah! Forget all your highbrow HBO dramas and PBS documentaries. For sheer entertainment value you just can’t beat beautiful and rich (yet angsty!) teenagers and their equally beautiful and rich parents all set to the background of today’s hippest rock ‘n’ roll tunes!

(Incidentally, the O.C. is often called this generation’s 90210. I don’t think that’s quite accurate since the O.C. is chock-full of pop culture references that only someone over 25 would get. Maybe it’s 90210 for people who actually watched 90210 when it was on?)

Matthew Yglesias makes the important and often-overlooked distinction between intervening militarily to stop ongoing crimes like genocide and intervening for the sake of regime-change toward democracy:

Operations of that sort are clearly different from operations aimed at halting an ongoing genocide or preventing an imminent one. There is a huge amount of space, both practical and conceptual, between a genocidal government and a democratic one. The liberal hawks who’ve been trying to assimilate the Iraq case to Kosovo and Bosnia [are] being willfully obtuse about this. “Morally,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in his article “Against Innocence: A Liberal’s War, Too” (TNR 3/3/03) “there is no significant difference between Halabja and Srebrenica.” And there isn’t. There was, however, a huge difference between them chronologically. The United States did not have the option in March, 2003 of sending a couple hundred thousand troops back in time to prevent Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds.

[…]

At any rate, this is all just to say that I think the way out of this thicket is pretty clear. If you have a good reason to invade and occupy an area, then, sure, you should try to build a good government there (that beats trying to build a bad one). Stopping an actual genocide is a good reason for war, as are genuine national security threats. Beyond that, promoting democracy is good. But there are way more democracies today than there were in 1945, or even 1975, and virtually none of that was achieved through forcible regime-change.

This is good stuff. And, despite my quasi-isolationist leanings, I’m not opposed in principle to the U.S. acting (preferably with allies) to put a stop to genocide or similar crimes. But, as Yglesias rightly points out, this is a far cry from “regime change” as an end in itself. (Though I’m not convinced the U.S. needed to intervene in Kosovo. Moreover, if intervention was called for it should’ve been handled by the Europeans. That, however, is part of the broader argument I’d want to make for the U.S. to pull back from its security commitments to countries that are perfectly capable of defending themselves and/or dealing with regional conflicts if need be.)

Here’s a very interesting article from British Christian writer (and self-described “post-Anglican”) Theo Hobson on what he calls the “ecclesiological fundamentalism” of contemporary theology, specifically among “postliberals” and members of the “radical orthodoxy” school.

I am suggesting that a form of ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ presently dominates academic theology; it underlies theological postmodernism. I will demonstrate this in relation to four influential theologians: Barth, Lindbeck, Hauerwas and Milbank.

The basic narrative of twentieth-century theology is the rejection of theological liberalism in favour of a new reliance on the distinctive practice of ‘the Christian community’. Which is to say, the church. But ‘the church’ in a very general, abstract sense. What emerges is a virtual-reality form of ecclesiology that exalts an abstract ideal rather than an actual institution. I suggest that such a theology results from the failure of modern Protestant thought.

Hobson sees Karl Barth as making an ecclesiological “turn” (or quasi-turn) in his thinking, turning from his early emphasis on the Word of God that stands over and above any institution to a more ecclesial stance later in his career. The banner of a high ecclessiology has been picked up by postliberals like Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Milbank, who emphasize the distinctive practices of the Christian community as the manifestation and the warrant for the truth of the Gospel.

Hauerwas’s emphasis on the Christian community has a corrective function: he is reacting very strongly against the American national ideal, which usurps the role of elect community. To some extent, this resembles Barth’s rejection of liberal Christian culture. But he is far quicker than Barth to identify the positive alternative: the authentic Christian community, distinct from the wider culture. Following Lindbeck, Hauerwas’s alternative polis is left denominationally vague: he does not claim that there is no salvation outside the Methodist Church. Yet he is at pains to emphasise that he means an actual community rather than an abstract ideal. And he makes very great claims for this ‘actual’ entity. Salvation, he asserts, ‘is a political alternative that the world cannot know apart from the existence of a concrete people called church.’

Hauerwas thus makes higher soteriological claims for ‘the community’ than his Yale school predecessors. It is the sole arena of Christian witness, and ‘witness’ is understood in a stronger sense than ‘communication’ or ‘proclamation’ – it is closer to ‘realization’. He therefore politicizes post-liberalism, introducing post-Marxist accounts of church and salvation. His rhetoric constantly flirts with chiliasm, as if salvation is to be achieved through the establishment of a pure Christian community. This vision is indebted to the radical Reformation, of course – and it also draws on Roman Catholic ecclesiology after Vatican II, ie. liberation theology.

Hobson thinks that there are several problems with the postliberal approach. First, it tends to deny that there is anything prior to the church – the church ends up being constitutive of the Gospel rather than a creature of the Word of God, which is always prior to the church in classic Protestantism. Secondly, it tends toward a “chiliastic ecclesiology” wherein the church is identified with the kingdom of God coming in its fullness. Thirdly, and ironically, “the church” in much postliberal theology becomes an idealized abstraction rather than referring to any actually existing institution. Discussing John Milbank’s views for instance, he writes:

Theology for Milbank is a sort of utopian sociology; it reflects on the ideal community of the church, which seems to hover somewhere between existence and non-existence. The introduction to his subsequent collection of essays, The Word Made Strange (1998), acknowledges that the ‘practice’, in which theology is based, is elusive.

For all the current talk of a theology that would reflect on practice, the truth is that we remain uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice… . [Consequently] the theologian feels almost that the entire ecclesial task falls on his own head: in the meagre mode of reflective words he must seek to imagine what a truly practical repetition [of Christian practice] would be like. Or at least he must hope that his merely theoretical continuation of the tradition will open up a space for wider transformation.

This is a surprisingly clear admission that his ecclesiology is very largely an exercise of the imagination. These essays repeatedly emphasise the priority of ecclesiology, which is of course understood in a very wide and complex sense. Ecclesiology is the engine of Milbank’s theology; yet he doesn’t deign to get his hands dirty by tackling actual ecclesiological issues (there are a few prickly ones in his own Church of England).

Radical Orthodoxy, the school of theology based in Milbank’s work, continues the theological critique of secular modernity as illusory and nihilistic. It argues that modernity results from a series of theological errors in the late Middle Ages, the arch-villain being Duns Scotus. The Reformation and the Enlightenment result from this intellectual Fall. (This denigration of Protestantism and the Enlightenment is reminiscent of the Oxford Movement – another English idealization of catholicism). Radical Orthodoxy wants to revive the ideal (and presumably the reality) of a secular-eclipsing Church, synonymous with culture, learning, civilization. Milbank’s movement therefore has the same theocratic leanings as we observed in Hauerwas’ vision.

The two other principal founders of Radical Orthodoxy are also Anglo-Catholics (Pickstock and Ward), and its godfather is another (Rowan Williams). This is little surprise: Anglo-Catholicism is ideally placed to produce such a theology, being catholic but not Roman Catholic. It has a natural propensity to reinvent theology as ecclesiological idealism.

Hobson concludes that this ecclesiological turn is a result of the failure of Protestant theology, as exemplified in Barth:

After liberalism, theology finds its justification in ‘church’. It fears to stray from ‘the community’, lest it end up back in the clutches of liberalism. But the term ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ needs qualification. For, as we have repeatedly seen, this trend does not identify ‘church’ with a particular institution. For all its talk of particularity, it is vague about what ‘Christian community’ it means, or if it really means any concrete one at all.

The triumph of virtual-ecclesiological-fundamentalism must be understood in relation to the demise of Protestant theology. After Barth, Protestant theology takes a very dramatic catholic-ecclesiological turn (which is tantamount to a suicide bid). Ironically, this is largely because of Barth: he was so successful in soiling ‘liberal Protestantism’ that he drove post-liberal Protestants into the arms of catholicism. Barth failed to make it adequately clear what the Protestant alternative to liberalism was: no such thing as Barthianism ever emerged. ‘Post-liberal’, or ‘post-modern’ theology is overwhelmingly catholic, and it is very often openly derisive of Protestantism. As a Protestant theologian, Barth was certainly a failure.

The afterlife of Protestantism is anti-liberalism in search of a church: Hauerwas is the embodiment of this. Post-Barthian theology is only Protestant in the negative sense, of balking at Rome’s claims: it has no substantially alternative vision. For it has effectively repented of the Reformation, which is blamed for the curse of liberalism. It is a less realistic, less rooted version of Roman Catholicism; its dreamy little sister.

I think there’s something to Hobson’s critique; I’ve never been fully convinced by the inflated claims for the church made by some of the “postliberals” whose thought I’m familiar with. The solution to the supposed crisis of authority or unbelief is not, I think, simply to take refuge in the authority of the church, even when it’s decked out with a suitably high “catholic” ecclesiology.

Interestingly, according to Hobson, Bonhoeffer criticized Barth on these very grounds:

It seems that Barth’s rejection of liberal Protestant theology was careless. He threw the Protestant baby out with the liberal bathwater.

Bonhoeffer sensed this. At the end of his life he re-thought his allegiance to Barth, and questioned his achievement as few have done since. He still applauded Barth’s early motivation: the criticism of religion, especially in its liberal Protestant form. He still hailed Barth’s prophetic quest for a renewal of Protestantism. But he now decided that Barth had failed in this quest. His neo-orthodox solution entailed a reactionary reliance upon ‘church’ that betrayed the spirit of his early radicalism.

Barth and the Confessing Church have encouraged us to entrench ourselves persistently behind the ‘faith of the church’, and evade the honest question as to what we ourselves really believe. To say it is the Church’s business, not mine, may be a clerical evasion, and outsiders always regard it as such… We cannot, like the Roman Catholics, simply identify ourselves with the church.

In Bonhoeffer’s judgement, and mine, Barth’s very Protestant revolution failed. His high ecclesiology (‘high’ in an abstract, quasi-Hegelian sense) drowned out his original vision. Bonhoeffer might not have been surprised to learn of Barth’s strange legacy: a golden age of catholic theology.

• Clark Stooksbury has a great take-down of spurious appeals to federalism by some of the President’s defenders:

Are [Hugh] Hewitt and [Christopher] Ruddy so deluded that they believe that the president and his advisors carefully read through the Constitution and the opinions of Learned Hand before deciding if they have the power to act? Bush had no concerns about federalism when he signed the No Child Left Behind Act, or when they went to the Supreme Court to override state governing the use of medical marijuana.The real issue concerns the President’s leadership.

It is hard to imagine any other plausible president — Clinton, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Buchanan — dithering the way that President Bush did in the aftermath of the hurricane. If Louisiana state officials were dragging their feet; I’m sure that President McCain, for example, would have got on the horn and found out what the hell the problem was, instead of waiting for paperwork to be filled out in triplicate. I doubt that President Kerry would stand around, patting his FEMA director on the back, or look forward to sittin’ on Trent Lott’s porch while people were still dying.

• Jesse Walker asks if the chaos in New Orleans represents the rule or the exception to what usually happens after major disasters.
• A disturbing account of people flipping out because Thomas Nelson Publishers is donating 100,000 Bibles to victims of Katrina in addition to a matching contribution plan for donations made by their employees.